"Angels can't be with people." In this brief, beautiful book, two disparate characters search restlessly for a prelapsarian state of being. Alma has travelled with her closest friend, Almut, to Brazil in search of local colour and excitement. Following a horrific attack perpetrated on Alma in São Paulo, the two flee to Australia to fulfil a lifelong fascination with Aboriginal art. Alma enters into an intense, wordless, yet healing affair with an Aboriginal painter; later she and Almut travel to Perth to participate in the city's Angel Project. Dressed as angels, they and others pose silently in various secret places, awaiting discovery by the public. Several years afterwards, in a snowbound Alpine spa, a disillusioned middle-aged literary critic recognises the masseuse tending him as one of those angels, with whom he experienced an electric, unforgettable night. Arch and learned, Nooteboom invokes Walter Benjamin's angel of history and Milton's Eden in a shimmering account of the desire for perfectability in a grossly imperfect world.

Catherine Taylor

Away, by Amy Bloom (Granta, £7.99)

This exceptional novel, both an acute commentary on America just prior to the great depression and a plot-thick, richly rewarding story, is Amy Bloom's most accomplished writing to date. It's 1924 and 22-year-old Lilian Leyb journeys alone to the home of a distant cousin on New York's Lower East Side. Her family in Russia had been massacred in an anti-Jewish pogrom which only Lilian and her three-year-old daughter Sophie escaped. Yet Sophie disappeared almost immediately after, and the tormented Lilian has come to America to reinvent herself. Soon she becomes the mistress of a theatrical impresario and his son; but when a relative appears with news of Sophie's survival and adoption, Lilian determines to return to Russia to search for her child. So begins a journey across an America teeming with people on the make - taking in a prim black hooker in Seattle and the occupants of a female corrective centre where Lilian is temporarily incarcerated - that becomes an astonishing odyssey through the Alaskan wilderness.CT

The Sirens of Baghdad, by Yasmina Khadra, translated by John Cullen (Vintage, £7.99)

Yasmina Khadra is the nom de plume of a male ex-Algerian army officer. In this novel, a young Bedouin Iraqi is also pulled between different identities. The narrator is from a desert village "so discreet that it often dissolves in mirages". It is unharmed by the invasion. But then the injured son of the local blacksmith is gunned down by checkpoint guards, a wedding party is decimated by bombs aimed at nonexistent terrorists and, finally, the narrator's house is raided and his father blasphemously exposed in his nightshirt. The plot creates a forceful argument that many terrorists are created by those who impose terror in their determination to eliminate it. When his narrator goes looking for vengeance, Khadra's subtle, parched evocation of village life is supplanted by the mayhem of Baghdad's slums and the novel increasingly peopled by characters who are violent arguments for one position or another. Fictionally speaking, it's a loss - but one that points to a greater loss of humanity which this cycle of hatred and reprisals exacts.

Caroline Miller

The Ingenious Edgar Jones, by Elizabeth Garner (Headline, £7.99)

Even the gargoyle-guarded spires dream of flight in Elizabeth Garner's dark fable of 19th-century Oxford. Devoutly bookish porter William Jones fathers the proud, illiterate Edgar, who leaps prematurely into the world on a night when meteors rain down on the colleges. Like Philip Pullman, Garner uses the great 19th-century discord of science and religion as an engine to power her sustained flight of fancy. Her characters are also defined by their high-flying desires, with Edgar's lust for iron, fire and flight ultimately destroying his father's dream of self-improvement. Garner's Oxford owes much to Pullman's, but she successfully draws the reader into her gothic maze of stony streets, thorny thickets and Machiavellian professors. Pragmatists may find it relies too much on light and mirrors. But Garner is also caustic about Oxford's mythical appeal and stacks up a magpie's nest of bright details. And she insists that these illusions - which are pretty toys for the powerful - can bring ruin upon the poor and talented if they trust them too entirely. CM

Funeral of the Heart, by Leah Hayes (Fantagraphics, £9.99)

The five short stories collected here are meant to convey a grim, otherworldly tone, and the titles - "The Bathroom", "The Needle", "The Hair" - are fittingly evocative. But Hayes's book is sabotaged throughout by a knowing, whimsical tone that drains the dark scenarios of their appeal and weakens the characterisations. The tale of two sisters connected to each other at birth by strands of hair begins with purpose and mystery, but is weighed down by an enforced quirkiness. The cute language and spells of magical realism are, thankfully, balanced by the artwork, a series of full-page, black and white scenes etched out on scratchboard. The atmospheric visuals prop up the stories and add depth and intrigue. Hayes scratches out menacing buildings and plump figures with pained expressions on their faces; a hospital looms in the darkness. The artwork is simple, beautiful, resonant and mysterious. Hopefully Hayes will be able to partner it in the future with writing that matches its impact.Craig Taylor